Delivery drone network charged by home solar panels
Telecommunications
Mobisol's Solar Air Distribution network will add drone recharging stations to the roofs of homes in rural Africa, creating a delivery infrastructure for its customers.
Register for full access
Our library content is no longer freely available. Please register to gain access to more than 12,000 innovations, updated daily. Our content is global in scope and covers solutions to the world's biggest challenges across 18 sectors.
We have seen drones deployed with automated landing and charging pads, and mobile payment solar power in rural Africa. Now sitting somewhere inbetween the two is Mobisol, a company that offers solar energy alternatives to low income communities in developing countries.
Mobisol currently has customers in over 40,000 solar homes in rural Tanzania and Rwanda. The Berlin-based company uses a pay-to-purchase model for the solar panels, and customers can pay the monthly installments using mobile phones. As a part of their new Solar Air Distribution network, Mobisol is adding drone recharging pads to the roofs of its customers’ homes, so that a network of delivery drones can travel longer distances by stopping off at the charging points. The drones can leapfrog from community to community, potentially delivering equipment to new locations to deploy more of Mobisol’s solar energy service.
Mobisol hope the network will expand solar energy to the off-grid market, as well as grow the business into an air delivery network by 2017. What other energy infrastructure could potentially have dual functions too?
26th April 2016
Email: communications@plugintheworld.com
Website: www.plugintheworld.com/mobisol
